I feel so influ­en­tual right now.

I think the abor­tion point was made because the mutant vampire/human hybrids were sup­pos­edly raven­ing beasts who would run ram­part and kill every­thing in their path. Includ­ing the mother.

The baby did break Bella’s spine on the way out (amongst other gra­tu­itous vio­lent mayhem)…

That last quote about the baby is wrong.

They did not know what a hybrid baby human/vampire would be like. It had never hap­pened in recorded vam­pire his­tory before. That’s why Edward was so ter­ri­fied when he dis­cov­ered Bella was pregnant.

The bit about being par­tic­u­larly dan­ger­ous and slaugh­ter­ing entire cities refers to YOUNG vam­pires; that is, a per­son (no mat­ter their age) who has only recently been turned into a vam­pire. Every vam­pire goes through that stage, in about the first year of their vam­pire “life”, and it is up to the vam­pire who cre­ated them to con­trol them and teach them the “rules”. In Eclipse, for exam­ple, a vam­pire intent on revenge cre­ates an army of “new­borns” with no inten­tion of con­trol­ling them or teach­ing them the rules. They are the dan­ger­ous vam­pires, not hybrid babies.

The Herald’s writer obvi­ously didn’t read Eclipse and Break­ing Dawn very closely. So really, the idea they should abort because the baby might have been insanely dan­ger­ous wasn’t even an issue. The only rea­son that abor­tion may have crossed their mind was because they noticed, as the preg­nancy pro­gressed, that it was hav­ing adverse health effects on Bella and could kill her. She refused to have an abor­tion just because the preg­nancy or birth might kill her. And that deci­sion is not for­eign to our world.

And Amy, there was no pae­dophilic sto­ry­line. For it to be pae­dophilic, there has to be some­thing sex­ual going on, or some sex­ual attrac­tion. There wasn’t.

I am split when it comes to the Twi­light series; I think in gen­eral the periph­eral sto­ry­lines are enter­tain­ing, and the periph­eral char­ac­ters are fun too. (And the not-so-peripheral char­ac­ters, like the Cullen fam­ily). But Edward, Bella, and the main romance sto­ry­line I find just lame. It’s stu­pid, it’s badly writ­ten, it’s pathetic, Bella’s a pushover and Edward is stu­pidly over-protective and I was annoyed when Edward returned at the end of New Moon. But Twilight’s had a lot of other crit­i­cisms lev­elled at it that I think are non-existent. The pae­doh­pilia crit­i­cism being one of them.

When it comes to 13 and 14 year old girls, they shouldn’t be read­ing Break­ing Dawn any­way. I wouldn’t want my sis­ter to read it, and she’s almost 16.

I haven’t read any of the Twi­light books, or seen any of the films. I prob­a­bly won’t. I have bet­ter things to do with my time.
I have bet­ter things to do with my time to watch movies , most of which tell me that all a girl needs to do to be happy is to hook up with a rich and hand­some bloke.

But yes, I’ll con­cede that it is prob­a­bly not quite the right term.
So find a term that means the slightly dis­turb­ing idea that some­one can fall in love with a baby and know that they are their life part­ner with­out either hav­ing any choice in the matter.

I’d agree totally with young teenage (or even older) girls read­ing this book. It’s all very enter­tain­ing (totally with­out lit­er­ary merit though) as long as you accept it as a fan­tasy. What’s dis­turb­ing is all these young girls (13, 14, 15 year-olds) who are run­ning around with shirts say­ing ‘I just want an Edward, is that too much to ask?’ and totally obsess­ing over a fic­tional char­ac­ter. How many bad choices are going to be made by these girls before they work out what a rela­tion­ship should be?

My main prob­lem with the series is about how it may delude teenage girls about what is accept­able behav­iour from their boyfriends. In New Moon Edward basi­cally tells Bella he doesn’t like her any­more and dumps her. Bella isn’t to know it’s really because he loves her and wants to pro­tect her etc. As far as she is con­cerned, she just got rejected. Big time. So she slumps into this mega depres­sion for months on end ignor­ing both her fam­ily and friends who she quite obvi­ously does not value as much as this sup­posed ‘love of her life’ who she only knew for a few months. Can’t you see all the deluded young girls ignor­ing their fam­ily and friends and say­ing ‘he’s really in love with me but…’ and mak­ing count­less excuses for their boyfriend’s bad behav­iour? The other dis­turb­ing thing is the domes­tic vio­lence sit­u­a­tion between Sam and Emily. Who cares if he only lost his tem­per ‘once’. Get out and get out NOW.